Ethnic minority households and residential segregation: how important is the household composition to understand where minorities live?

Although both the ethnic enclave theory and the spatial assimilation theory consider residential segregation as the aggregated result of individual residential decisions, neither pay attention to the possible influences of household composition, despite the fact that it is frequently established that household composition is an important factor shaping residential mobility. Moreover, there are reasons to assume that the residential preferences underlying both theories diverge for different types of households. This article attempts to fill this lacuna by integrating the household composition of ethnic minorities in both the ethnic enclave theory and the spatial assimilation theory. We therefore investigate the link between the presence of four different ethnic minority (i.e. with roots in North-Africa or Turkey) household types (i.e. singles; cohabitating, childless couples; lone parents; and families with young children) and (1) the chance that a neighbourhood houses a concentration of ethnic minorities of that group and (2) the citywide segregation of these ethnic minorities. The former is tested by using a binary logistic multilevel analysis with a dichotomization of the locational quotient as the dependent variable. The latter is investigated by performing a linear regression on the dissimilarity index. Both analyses are performed on the 2001 Census of Belgium and the Belgian National Registry. Ethnic minority households and residential segregation: how important is the household composition to understand where minorities live?

Jaar van publicatie:2016